Month: July 2021

Enlarge / Eric Schmitt, Missouri Attorney General. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Missouri has been one of the hardest-hit states so far in these early days of a delta-fueled COVID-19 surge. Cases increased nearly 500 percent since the start of July, while vaccinations stalled. Right now, with just 41 percent of the state fully vaccinated, 112 of the state's 114 counties have high or substantial levels of coronavirus spread. Hospitalizations are up statewide, and some facilities have already run out of ventilators and seen intensive care units hit maximum capacity. Deaths are also increasing, with more than 300 people losing their lives this month since July 1. And the proportion of COVID-19 tests coming back positive is still rising, suggesting that things will likely only get worse in the weeks to come.

By nearly every metric, this entirely preventable surge is tragic. Yet, it hasn't stopped the Show Me State's Republican attorney general, Eric Schmitt, from waging war on local health restrictions aimed at trying to curb transmission. On Monday, Schmitt filed a lawsuit to stop St. Louis County and St. Louis City from enforcing mask mandates for fully vaccinated people and children, which took effect that day.

The timing of the lawsuit is awkward. It partly rests on now-outdated guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that fully vaccinated people didn't need to wear masks in most indoor settings. "The Mask Mandates are arbitrary and capricious because they require vaccinated individuals to wear masks, despite the CDC guidance that this is not necessary," the lawsuit claims. The rest of the lawsuit didn't argue that masks were ineffective at curbing transmission but rather claimed that they were unnecessary for children—despite that they are largely ineligible for vaccinations—and that requiring them is "unconstitutional." Otherwise, the lawsuit nitpicked language of the mandates, such as alleging that they didn't define the word "dwelling."

Enlarge / President Joe Biden speaks at Mack Truck Lehigh Valley Operations on July 28, 2021, in Macungie, Pennsylvania. (credit: Getty Images | Michael M. Santiago)

A bipartisan infrastructure deal will provide $65 billion for broadband deployment and require ISPs that receive funding "to offer a low-cost affordable plan," the White House said today.

President Joe Biden pledged early in his term to lower Internet prices, and this appears to be the first tangible result—although it will only affect ISPs that take the new funding, and the White House didn't release key details about the affordable Internet plans. A White House fact sheet on the $550 billion infrastructure deal with senators included two paragraphs summarizing the broadband portions:

[M]ore than 30 million Americans live in areas where there is no broadband infrastructure that provides minimally acceptable speeds—a particular problem in rural communities throughout the country. The deal's $65 billion investment ensures every American has access to reliable high-speed Internet with a historic investment in broadband infrastructure deployment, just as the federal government made a historic effort to provide electricity to every American nearly one hundred years ago.

The bill will also help lower prices for Internet service by requiring funding recipients to offer a low-cost affordable plan, by creating price transparency and helping families comparison shop, and by boosting competition in areas where existing providers aren't providing adequate service. It will also help close the digital divide by passing the Digital Equity Act, ending digital redlining, and creating a permanent program to help more low-income households access the Internet.

“Low-cost” definition not released yet

The announcement didn't say what speeds or prices will have to be offered by government-funded ISPs in the required low-cost plans. It also didn't say whether those low-cost plans would be available to all customers or only those who meet certain income requirements.

Enlarge / Artist's reconstruction of Thomas Cromwell's mansion on Throgmorton Street in 1539, London, England. (credit: Peter Urmston)

Tudor England was a treacherous place for ambitious courtiers, as the steady rise and sudden tragic fall of Thomas Cromwell—one of the chief architects of the English Reformation under King Henry VIII—makes clear. Cromwell had just completed work on a magnificent private mansion in London when he fell out of the king's favor and was summarily beheaded. Now, a British historian has produced the most detailed analysis yet of both that mansion and the townhouse in which Cromwell lived prior to its completion, presented in a new paper published in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association.

"These two houses were the homes of this great man; they were the places where he lived with his wife and two daughters, where his son grew up," said Nick Holder, a historian and research fellow at English Heritage and the University of Exeter, who authored the new paper. "It was also the place he went back to at night after being with Henry VIII at court and just got on with the hard graft of running the country. No one else has looked at these two houses in quite as much detail, comparing all the available evidence. This is about as close as you are going to get to walking down these 16th-century corridors."

There was a time when historians considered Thomas Cromwell to be a rather insignificant court figure during Henry VIII's reign. That view began to shift in the 1950s as historians realized just how much Cromwell may have influenced the king and Parliament during a particularly chaotic period in British history. Much of that chaos, it must be said, stemmed from the monarch's impetuous nature, particularly when it came to wives.